DOVER — Mayor Pat Johnson told the Dover City Council during its regular meeting Tuesday night he and the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department were discussing a partnership to address flooding problems on West Camp Street.

During an inspection, AHTD found some walls under the sidewalk that appear to cause the flooding.

“Sometime someone — and we don’t know who — has come in and they built some walls, and it actually restricts the water down,” Johnson said. “The highway department felt like we’ve got to get that fixed before we fix anything else. There’s obviously some stuff underneath the bridge, that goes across the highway ... that’s holding things up too.”

The city had initially planned to build retaining walls to address the flooding, but partnering with AHTD may change that.

Johnson said AHTD officials suggested installing two 42-inch culverts under the highway.

“Instead of putting retaining walls there, we’d put those culverts to channel the water,” he told the council. “They would just charge us $1,200 and that’s the cost of the culverts. It would cost us more than $1,200 to get in there with our machinery and clean it up.”

Alderman Roger Lee said he was in favor of the partnership.

“I think that’s a no-brainer,” he said.

Johnson told the council, aside from the $1,200 culverts, the city would be responsible for building a bridge to hold up the sidewalk.

Alderman Carl Wetzel asked Johnson if the bridge that’s already there was good enough to re-use and Johnson said no.

“We’re going to have to build a bridge across there,” he said.

Alderman Ila Anderson recalled having money left over from a grant the city received several years ago and asked about using the funds.

“All we could use it for was building bridges and stuff like that,” Anderson said.

Treasurer/Recorder Regina Kilgore pulled the records, showing a balance of $4,200 in the special fund.

“We need to use it,” the mayor said of the grant. “We’ve talked about this before but never had a place really to use it.”

The mayor said he was in the process of getting easements from property owners of both sides of the highway to ensure the city or AHTD has permission for improvements.

Look for more coverage of the meeting in future editions of The Courier.